Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Indigo (In the Series "Cinemasparagus Turns 10")

Part of a year-long retrospective series of pieces 'of note' published here over the course of the first ten years of Cinemasparagus. The following was originally posted on September 29, 2008.

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Silly/Con Graphics

"You know the end of the movie 2001, where the Starchild's coming down to the earth, with its eyes wide open? That's these kids; they're going to shift everything."

Indigo by Stephen Simon, 2003:

2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, 1968:

Indigo by Stephen Simon, 2003:

Full Metal Jacket by Stanley Kubrick, 1987:

There's practically nothing to say about this film that isn't already present in every contemplation of the generic. And yet the form, the existence of Indigo raises at least one question: Where does the vanity project end, and personal cinema commence?

The answer starts (lies?) at pixel-x, plotted somewhere along that chromatic, Gradient Tool'd band that illustrates the cinema ("cela s'appelle l'aurore") whenever it lap-dissolves to crepuscular A/V propaganda. Indigo'ism is an ideology or conviction-system (keyword: system) like any other — Christianity, etc. Hence Stephen Simon's Indigo, founded on the ridiculous and assuredly outmoded principle that "the children" are innocent lambs who, withal, can point us in the direction of ego-chloroformed thought, unitchy/ants-less rolls in the grass, and Roubini-appeasing economic safeguards. Or so we'd be led to believe.

Indigo by Stephen Simon, 2003:

It says something about adults so adrift, and so shallow, that they experience repeated, even (let us say) post-Vinelandian urges to stare backward into the (hindsought) blank slate of childhood, to chase the dream of the Holy Idiot, with the notion it will justify their own blankness of idea-actualization, or of actual ideas, and, in the parlance of regression, synch up with the discovery of some way 'out' from the piles and piles of traumas, disappointments, and outright abuse that they themselves have endured through their largely ineffectual, and/or hair's-breadth-from-abusive, bluebirdbrain'd (jackdraw'n?

Little Lexicon of Anglophone Cliché: A Work in Progress c. 2007

"For [so-and-so, in dedication]" (exception: the Histoire(s) du cinéma, which invented the practice in cinemaville)

"I found myself unprepared for the emotional wallop"

"Love it or hate it, ... "

"Unfortunately, compared with Rohmer's earlier work, in particular the series known as 'Six Moral Tales,' The Romance of Astrea and Celadon has little to say about eros that's still relevant. It's a film so embarrassingly quaint it's crying out for a parody called Not Another Medieval Movie."